gdanmitchell wrote:
1985 for me, though I did use a very early IBM (literally) PC before that. And before that? A PDP11. It is a bit of a story…
Yup the IBM was my first venture into computing. 8088 processor with 2 - 5 1/2" floppy drives, a rudimentary graphics card, green screen monitor and an Okidata printer that was built like a tank. Cost was well over $5,000. Hard Drives did not exist. When they did come available it was only 5 MB, they were huge, weighed a bunch and cost over $700.
Apple marketing is so powerful, they even convince people that computers with Mac operating system aren't personal computers, that only computers with the Windows operating system are personal computers.
I have maxed out my RAM usage with very large Lightroom Classic Imports and no other program running other than the system monitor program. I have 64GB of RAM. I have my M3 MacBook Pro M3 Max plugged into a 140 watt charger and when running PhotoSweeper to eliminate duplicates, it reaches 1400% CPU usage for hours on end with very large deduplication request. Interesting how it handles this. The charge goes down to 7% and then up to around 14% and continues this cycle until complete. You do have to turn off automatic updates when running long processes… at least, I have always turned them off. I was trying to pull images from 10TB of images/movies which were orginally on a NAS and get rid of duplicates. These were 20 years of backing up over 20 computers from everyone in the family, including a picture of every meal ever consumed by my wife.. I’ve yet to workup the courage to extract images from my Synology Drive backup that sits on a NAS. It is over 37TB. In fact, yesterday I started moving this folder to a replacement, new Synology NAS using Terminal on my Mac. It took a long time to get all parameters on both NAS set properly, but eventually Grok got me sorted and now, for the next five days, rsync is moving the backup to the new NAS. These are all extreme cases that I never anticipated, but I wonder how RAM size influences functioning of LRC and other programs. I’ve now started a project to place all movies, at least the BluRay and BluRay 4k on a new primary Ugreen NAS and all of 20 years of home video to be streamed at full resolution at home and over the Internet via Jellifin. Again, I used Grok to sort out what components to purchase to meet my NAS objectives. This required quite a bit of back and forth, but it has helped me to understand these NAS and how to set them up. I believe that a good AI agent is a great tool (not the last word) in when you can clearly state your objectives so that the AI agent has something to work with. The good news is that you can stream full resolution 4K content via Internet without the heavy compression seen with streaming services. The bad news is that a majority of 4K Ultra movies are just 2K upscales.. OK.. done .. Just wanted to convey the usefulness of RAM & AI.
MIRANDA1 wrote:
1985, WOW that was really early, I only got into MACs a bit later, prior to that I was on PCs, including my first laptop, a Toshiba 3200 which was the size of a small carry-on suitcase it had a horrendous orange gas plasma display but was absolutely cutting edge back in the late 80s.
Commodore pet in the late 70’s before getting an IBM PC in 82. Prior to that in the mid 70’s I spent many a night boot strapping the pdp 11 OS off of ticker tape before being able to use the machine.
Long term update on the dock; this dock is simply amazing. Transfer speeds are pretty decent, anywhere from 550mbps and up. And I really like how it covers today's most used memory cards: SD, CFExpress A & B. I wish it had 2 SSD slots, but it'll do with one.
If you run a lot of AI processes, such as masks but especially Denoise, be aware that LR stores that information in the lrcat-data file and it can balloon to massive proportions.
In part because of this I have moved my LR catalog to my external working drive (NVMe) to keep the system drive less full. I actually make separate catalogs for every event/job/trip I generate and archive this catalog along with the event/job/trip folders when I back up to my 'archive' drives.
FWIW, I've just been running thousands (~5k) of 45MP files through Denoise and it balloons the catalog into the 50-70GB range.
One of my systems is 48GB RAM and I can confirm that with a catalog in the 5000 image range, if applying Denoise to all those images and then doing an export, that it can result in a system memory pop-up warning that asks to force quit the offending app(s). I've found that after such a large Denoise batch, it's helpful to quit and reopen LR to release the memory it's holding from the Denoise process. It then exports the full-res files without issue and very quickly.
hanay78 wrote:
Any suggestion on what configuration one needs for photo processing, processor, RAM, etc?
Depends on how you do photo processing. If you are in the Adobe ecosystem, edit a lot of images and use a lot of AI processes, such as masks and Denoise - especially Denoise - it helps to get a system with as many GPU cores as you can justify.
Denoise leans heavily on the GPU when it runs. I watch Activity Monitor and during Denoise, CPU use is extremely low and GPU approaches 100%.
That said, with the recent LR Classic 15.4 release, LR finally leverages Apple's on-chip Neural Engines to speed up AI processes. As all M chipsets other than Ultra have 16 ANE cores, this appears to more greatly benefit base level non-Pro and Pro chips with lower GPU cores, making those less of a liability for AI processes than they used to be.
My older M system, an M1 Pro, is 1TB storage and 16GB RAM. It generally handles having a large number of apps and browser windows running, including LR and/or PS and/or Photo Mechanic. As the internal SSD is fast, it will swap memory to it when necessary. It's not ideal, but it works. I did notice though that LR would become a touch laggy when editing 45MP files instead of 24MP files. As in the past, if you can budget for more storage and RAM, it can be useful. But it also depends on how heavy your workload is. Unfortunately as of a couple days ago, it appears Apple increased their prices quite substantially due to the worldwide memory/storage shortage. If you already have at least a USB 3.2 10Gbps external SSD, you can definitely use it as your working drive and opt for a lower storage amount on the system drive to save some money or direct that money towards more RAM.
hanay78 wrote:
Any suggestion on what configuration one needs for photo processing, processor, RAM, etc?
Mine is doing just fine Mac Mini M4 Pro with 24GB RAM. As I said, I rendered through 6K R3D RAW in less than half the time vs my old PC running I7 12700K, RTX 2080 and 32GB RAM. Sucks though, Apple just hiked prices and what I have now is like $300 more
rscheffler wrote:
That said, with the recent LR Classic 15.4 release, LR finally leverages Apple's on-chip Neural Engines to speed up AI processes. As all M chipsets other than Ultra have 16 ANE cores, this appears to more greatly benefit base level non-Pro and Pro chips with lower GPU cores, making those less of a liability for AI processes than they used to be.
For me, the newly upgraded AI Denoise is now taking about 1/3 of the time it previously took and sometimes a bit less than that.
I have been running Windows 11 Pro now for several years on my older PC and my brand new build. Never had a single crash in all that time. I usually have DxO Pure Raw, Lightroom, and Photoshop CC running in 32 GB of memory, usually have multiple R5 files open, with no issues at all.
I thought about changing to a Mac before my latest rebuild, but cost to performance did not add up. The other thing that made me decide to stick with the PC is software. I run programs on my PC I have hade for 20 years with no problems. I read all the time about people running Macs who can't run even fairly recent older programs on new systems.
It is an individual choice of course, and I am not trashing Macs because they are good computers. But, if your PC is set up right running Windows 11, nothing could be simpler to use. I turn my PC on, click three icons and I am ready for hours of hassle free photo editing.
PSBaxter wrote:
I have been running Windows 11 Pro now for several years on my older PC and my brand new build. Never had a single crash in all that time. I usually have DxO Pure Raw, Lightroom, and Photoshop CC running in 32 GB of memory, usually have multiple R5 files open, with no issues at all.
I thought about changing to a Mac before my latest rebuild, but cost to performance did not add up. The other thing that made me decide to stick with the PC is software. I run programs on my PC I have hade for 20 years with no problems. I read all the time about people running Macs who can't run even fairly recent older programs on new systems.
It is an individual choice of course, and I am not trashing Macs because they are good computers. But, if your PC is set up right running Windows 11, nothing could be simpler to use. I turn my PC on, click three icons and I am ready for hours of hassle free photo editing....Show more →
I think we all get used to what we get used to, :-)
I do agree that if you are comfortable on your platform it is often best to just stick with it. You can do pretty much anything on any platform these days, and relearning years of computer instincts can be very challenging.
From long experience, at least some (actually quite a few) of those “people running the other platform can’t do this” stories turn out to be outliers that hardly affect anyone.
gdanmitchell wrote:
I do agree that if you are comfortable on your platform it is often best to just stick with it. You can do pretty much anything on any platform these days, and relearning years of computer instincts can be very challenging.
From long experience, at least some (actually quite a few) of those “people running the other platform can’t do this” stories turn out to be outliers that hardly affect anyone.
I'm not sure that Linux is well supported with Apple M series. Maybe people use Asahi, but I haven't tried. It's just that so many more Linux options with x86_64.
Reading FM one would think there is no other purpose to computers other than LR.
EB-1 wrote:
I'm not sure that Linux is well supported with Apple M series. Maybe people use Asahi, but I haven't tried. It's just that so many more Linux options with x86_64.
Reading FM one would think there is no other purpose to computers other than LR.
EBH
For the great majority of users, any computer that can effectively run LR will be more than enough computer for them.
If you need something else — e.g. run Linux — you are an exception and you probably know what you need.
EB-1 wrote:
Outside of FM or photographers, I don't know any people using LR.
EBH
Not sure where you are going with this. The context in this forum is photography, and here the people discussing this are likely to be using LR or equivalent software and to be highly interested in how computers perform for photography tasks.
No doubt at least some use their computers for other serious tasks that have different computing power and interface requirements than photography, but they most likely have a pretty good idea of what they need.
rscheffler wrote:
If you run a lot of AI processes, such as masks but especially Denoise, be aware that LR stores that information in the lrcat-data file and it can balloon to massive proportions.
That is basically a folder which you can access and delete files from. At least Lightroom Classic worked that way many years ago. I had a bash script to delete all previews that were older than 2 months.
I believe that kind of scripting can be applied for denoise data too. But I haven't used Lightroom in many years and I cannot be sure of that.
Yes, you can delete the entire 'previews' file or entire 'data' file, but with the latter, if you do so, you lose all the AI edits data for whatever was in that catalog. If I understand correctly, the catalog will still know the details about those AI edits, but the calculations to apply the AI Denoise, for example, would have to be done again to update the files (it would be something to test first with a few images in a test catalog before doing a wholesale deletion of the lrcat.data file from an actual catalog). That said, you can also save edits to accompany the original RAW files in the form of Adobe's new .acr sidecar files. As long as the .acr file accompanies the RAW, you can load it into another catalog and it will have all the edits, including AI edits and their calculations data, which would avoid the need to run the AI processes again.
The better way to manage the lrcat.data file, if you have removed a significant number of images that had AI edits and want to remove their accompanying data from the lrcat.data file, is to optimize the catalog.
As an example of how storage hungry the lrcat.data file can become, I have a catalog to which I have just applied AI Denoise to ~17,000 images (25% 45MP, 65% 24MP and the remainder 20MP). The lrcat.data file is 135GB.
I have also discovered that LrC uses a lot of memory for exports. I've been doing batches of 5000+ images and inevitably run into system 'out of memory' warnings with 48GB RAM. Smaller batches and restarting LrC to clear whatever system memory it's holding has been my solution, but it would be nice if LrC would release memory as images are exported.
